Picture if you will, the quietness of space. Aboard a space vessel with a dozen or so of your friends, when suddenly that quiet atmosphere is grotesquely disturbed by the voracious appetite of a horrific killer. One by one, your friends are picked apart and you attempt to save anyone that remains from certain death. The threat looms closer, your heart pounding in your chest, sweat dripping from your face, fingers squeezing tightly to the pistol grip of your weapon as alarms are going off all around you, making it impossible to hear a thing. The ponies get closer, and then…Wait, ponies? Like, My Little Ponies? WTF? Shit, I need to wake up.
I’ve got some pretty messed up dreams. I mean, I know people have weird dreams and all, but I have some really f*#ked up things going on inside my melon at night when my head hits the pillow. My wife believes it is my form of PTSD from my military days. I didn’t normally have these things going on, but after coming back from my lone combat deployment to Afghanistan in 2007, I started having these dreams. It isn’t like my combat rotation was all that explosive or anything. Sure, as an SF guy you can be in some tense situations, but as one of the few snipers on my team I was often far removed from the immediate action in an observation post where I could cover my guys’ backside if shit hit the fan. I was rarely kicking in doors. Yea, there were a few times I felt my life was in immediate danger, but nothing I lost sleep over. his is why I never really gave the whole PTSD thing any credence. Apparently, once I came home, I lost a lot of sleep over it, because I was having some whacked out nightmares.
Well, here we are in 2018 and the weekly dreamscapes continue in fantastically violent fashion. Since I was 19 years old I had prepared myself mentally for the brutality and violence that war would bring. I saw it as an inevitability that I would have to fight for my life, and the best way to do that was in a violent manner. I had to accept that violence was okay. I trained like I would fight, as the saying goes. So naturally my head just accepted violence as a reality. Training to shoot, training to fight, training to be violent, and then spending years training others to do the same can have a particular effect on one’s grey matter. It never really leaves you, as it just becomes a small part of who you are. I don’t get violent, but my brain still reacts and responds in the same ways that it use to when I had to be. Night time is when everything else quiets down, and it seems that is when my brain processes everything I have encountered through the day and gives me a nice little story for when I am asleep.
So when I watch a movie, play a video game, or take my daughter to the park, my brain rehashes these events in an oddly detailed, oftentimes violent manner. Hence, I end up with a dream of a My Little Pony bursting out of someone’s chest like Alien and picking off the crew one-by-one. Creepy? No doubt. Adorable? Absolutely! I mean, for me it was.
Having a toddler has just made these dreams exponentially weirder. I no longer spend my days running and gunning. So my dreams consist of the mundane tasks I do as a stay-at-home dad. Instead, it’s parks and swim lessons and Blaze and the Monster Machines. The last few weeks have been a daily onslaught of The My Little Pony Movie over and over. My brain can only handle so much before it goes into protective measures. So when I watch an unhealthy amount of Pinkie Pie, followed by a movie like Alien: Covenant, the shit between my ears mashes them up into a sadistic crossover that only I can view. And it happens all the time. I’ve saved the day with talking monster trucks; fought off masked killers with tiny robots who love math; protected my daughter’s gym from mercenaries with a bunch of twenty-something kids’ gymnastics instructors. You name it, I have probably dreamt it.
Dreams, or more specifically nightmares, are a common sign of PTSD. The VA website has a brief summary of this here: Nightmares and PTSD. In PTSD patients, nightmares are generally a replay of the events which caused PTSD. It is trauma induced. Yet, not every case of PTSD is induced by a singular event. It can be a succession of events which cause trauma. I may not be replaying the same event over and over in my brain, but the things of which I dream at night, i.e. shooting, assaulting, defending, and getting vigorously shot at, are all things I have experienced in a short amount of time. No doubt others share these same types of dreams and never truly seek to understand where they come from.
It is interesting how the things I do in my life now have bled into the life I once had. While I have worked aggressively at separating the two, it demonstrates how these things will always be connected. I once thought I was past the violence-filled life I had; now I see that it will always remain, and even incorporate the G-rated lifestyle I have crafted for myself today. It is a truly remarkable dichotomy, because I never fathomed when I was a 23-year old hard-charger that I would be having dreams filled with evil, diabolical Disney characters. And that I would be using my expertise in destroying life itself to battle against them! But shit, sometimes that’s just the way the world works and you roll with the punches.
If these dreams, or nightmares, really are indicative of some non-diagnosed case of PTSD, hey, I’m okay with that. There are so many others out there who have severe PTSD issues that make it hard to live a normal day-to-day life. My nightly dose of wacko-Jacko dreams doesn’t give me real problems, just some interesting and disgusted reactions from my wife when I tell her what I had just gone through. To me this is just an interesting side-effect of fatherhood coupled with my past experiences as a full-fledged snake-eater. Perhaps some of you can relate. Or maybe I’m just f*#kin’ batshit nutty.
